Justice Issues

March 4, 2007

by Lona Manning

As Bruno Richard Hauptmann counted down the days to his execution at the State Prison in Trenton, N.J., his wife Anna went on the lecture circuit, asking her fellow German immigrants to donate to the Hauptmann defense fund. Her husband was not guilty of the "Crime of the Century," she pleaded -- he had not kidnapped and murdered the little Lindbergh baby.

Many checks were mailed directly to Hauptmann at the Death House. He realized that the donors who sent only one dollar didn't necessarily believe in his innocence, they wanted him to endorse the check so they could have the autograph of the man condemned for killing the child of the world-famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh.

November 27, 2006
(updated 3/12/07)

by Denise Noe

Mississippi Is Not Chicago

People in the Chicago neighborhood where Emmett "Bobo" Till lived knew the 14-year-old as an attention-getter. Despite the stutter left by a bout with polio in his infancy, he had a confident, even cocky, personality and relished pranks and jokes. In an interview that appeared in the PBS documentary, The Murder of Emmett Till, childhood acquaintance Richard Heard recalled how Emmett entertained his schoolmates one day in gym: "I remember Emmett raising his shirt up to about his navel and making his belly roll, waves of fat rolling and it just broke us up. The whole gym went crazy."

March 23, 2004

Who are they? These images are a sampling of unidentified victims profiled on The Doe Network.

by Lona Manning

Todd Matthews has always known where he belongs. His home is in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, where the soft-spoken 33-year-old lives with his wife and two young sons. Home is where the ties to his past are as close as the quiet graveyard where his ancestors are buried. "I was born, live and work in a three-mile radius," Matthews explains. This may be why, he surmises, he is obsessed with helping people who are lost. Specifically, dead people who are lost.

April 4, 2009

by J. Patrick O'Connor

Since his conviction in 1982 for the murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, through his numerous books, essays and radio commentaries, has become the face of the anti-death penalty movement in the United States and an international cause célèbre. Paris, for example, made him an honorary citizen in 2003, bestowing the honor for the first time since Pablo Picasso received it in 1971.

by John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne

Scientific crime solving or sci-crime – it is an image upon which much of the FBI's awesome reputation is based. Humans are fallible, are inclined to lie and are often motivated by anything but the truth. The history of crime fighting in the United States is littered with eyewitnesses who misidentified a suspect, defense lawyers who persuaded juries to find reasonable doubt, and suspects who had credible alibis. The physical evidence on the other hand is the silent, definitive witness. The traces of explosives on Timothy McVeigh's clothes in Oklahoma City, the bloody shoe-prints left by the killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in Los Angeles, the saliva traces recovered from the sealed envelope of a letter claiming responsibility for the bombing of the World Trade Center…all these offer certainty. And certainty equals proof.

by J.J. Maloney

[Editor's Note: to read more about this case go to http://kcfirefighterscase.com ]

For many years Frank and Skip Sheppard were the Injun Joes of Marlborough - the down-on-its-heels neighborhood in southeast Kansas City where six firefighters were killed in an explosion Nov. 29, 1988. Like the character by that name in Tom Sawyer, they were perceived by many as evil characters in whose wake woe would surely follow.

These two brothers - large, forbidding Native Americans, scared people. When Skip Sheppard was in a car wreck that killed his fiancée and left him in a coma, some people said he deliberately drove in front of a truck to get rid of the fiancée.

So it's no surprise that Frank and Skip were among the early suspects in the firefighter case - and that Frank's girlfriend, Darlene Edwards, Frank's nephew Bryan Sheppard, and Bryan's best friend Richard Brown, would be included as well.

When the firefighter case had gone unsolved for eight years - and seemed incapable of being solved - these five became expendable.

By J.J. Maloney

[Editor's Note: to read more about this case go to http://kcfirefighterscase.com ]

Indictment and Trial

The ATF has four "National Response Teams" - teams which respond to disasters such as the Oklahoma City bombing - and Special Agent Dave True was leader of the Midwest team. He is a distinguished looking man with silver hair and mustache.

With 26 years of government service under his belt, True, who was in his early 50s, was ready to take retirement from the ATF and open the next chapter in his life, possibly as a consultant or a security executive for a corporation. There was a hitch, though. For more than eight years, the unsolved firefighters case had dogged him. As the ATF's top special agent in Kansas City, True didn't want to retire with the biggest case of his life hanging over his head, unsolved.